Abstract
The standard theory of the mind and language, as Caldwell understands it, is that human thinking doesn’t occur in language at all, but takes place in ‘mentalese’, a purely formal manipulation of logical concepts that then correlate to words. Contrary to the linguistic relativist hypothesis, all languages are fundamentally equal in this, and though the words may differ the thinking is the same. Here though, Caldwell proposes a different view, drawing attention to the fact that the human brain is the kind of thing that creates synthetic organisations out of the sense data it receives from the world. These synthetic organisations are molecular sememes, the arenas where linguistic meaning is created; for our minds bring our experiences of the world into focus, and into discourse. Once in focus these molecules can be given a name, and they may have different names at different times, in different discourses, and sometimes have no name at all. Thus, on Caldwell’s view it is not just different languages and cultures that may be incommensurate – even different discourses in the same language may be so with one another. Molecular Sememics therefore stands in opposition to both standard theory and linguistic relativism, being more akin to linguistic pluralism, where any language and any speaker, can express the meanings of the world in many different ways.
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Notes
- 1.
See Pinker (1994), pp. 55ff, the chapter on ‘Mentalese’.
- 2.
- 3.
This philosophical conflict could be expressed in many ways. Whorf, along with Edward Sapir and Franz Boas, reflected ideas popular among European Structuralists and thought to be historically related to those of Humboldt in the nineteenth century and maybe even Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century: that language, thought, and culture are deeply interrelated, and that the semantic systems of various languages are fundamentally incommensurate with each other. In its “strong form”, it implies that the nature of one’s language governs the nature of one’s thought. I take Orwell to represent a political application of that idea. Pinker, on the other hand, represents the currently dominant cognitive scientists, who see human cognition as genetically based and therefore universal to the species. John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson see this position as related to a classical argument by St. Augustine (fourth century) who argued that language only provides names for logical concepts which already exist. Cf. their Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, especially the Introduction.
- 4.
It seems to me that this position is extremely counter-intuitive, not to mention contradictory. Though he has earlier admitted that humans are good at what computers are poor at, and vice versa, he sees his own mind as computer-like. Though he presumably thinks of himself as an intelligent human being, he believes in a theory that does not admit the existence of human intelligence. But he does believe in a mental “representor” which can apprehend universally existing “concepts”. This makes him, like Coleridge (whom he cites on page 70), seem more like a romantic transcendentalist.
- 5.
Actually it’s worse. I am, I guess, a linguistic pluralist. That is, I believe that some experiences are genuinely incommensurate with others, and that discourses about them might be likewise incommensurate with each other. If things were otherwise, human beings would probably communicate with each other a lot better than they do (I’ll explain more about this below).
- 6.
For a discussion of its application to literary meanings, see Caldwell, “Molecular Sememics: A Model for Literary Interpretation”, Meisei Review, Vol. 15 (2000), 155–162. [Reprinted here in its final form as Chapter 6 – Eds.]
- 7.
For a fuller discussion, see Caldwell, “Topic-Comment Effects in English”, Meisei Review Vol. 17 (2002), pp. 48–69.
- 8.
For a fuller discussion, see Caldwell, “Molecular Sememics: A Progress Report”, Meisei Review Vol. 4 (1989), pp. 65–86. [Reprinted here in its final form as Chapter 2 – Eds.]
- 9.
This sense of knowing which words can be used appropriately testifies to the coercive power of discourse to define the molecule so precisely that fine nuances of meaning can be noticed, depending on what name or mark is given to it.
- 10.
When I say this, I mean it in a prototypical sense. Obviously, much has been conventionalized in discourse, and this means that many discourses take similar explanatory routes to clarity, and their logics tend to resemble each other. But the essential tendency of discourse towards uniqueness is very real too.
- 11.
By the way, music is a form of discourse, and its phrases and gambits create molecule-selection-and-execution structures, just as human sentences do.
- 12.
It might be argued, for example, that on a simple level, the discourse of golf is incommensurate with the discourse of baseball. The word “steal” has no meaning in golf, and the word “putt” has no meaning in baseball. Paul Kay points out that the expressions “loosely/strictly speaking” and “technically speaking” both refer to coherent theories of how words refer to objects, but that the two theories are radically different from each other. For a thorough discussion of this issue, see Paul Kay’s essay “Intra-speaker Relativity”, in Gumpers and Levinson (1996), pp. 97–114, particularly p. 99.
- 13.
Kay argues that at least the “consequences (of linguistic relativism) for intercultural communication, and so on, may be less dire than often supposed” (1996, p. 101).
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Caldwell, T.P., Cresswell, O., Stainton, R.J. (2018). Whorf, Orwell, and Mentalese (The Molecular Sememe: Some Implications for Semantics). In: Cresswell, O., Stainton, R. (eds) Discourse, Structure and Linguistic Choice. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75441-3_3
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